from the you-only-think-this-is-free dept

It's pretty obvious that The Masnick only pretends to take the weekend off, because man did Techdirt start off the week with some solid stories. While the Techdirt team is pretending to relax, you can catch up on the best posts from the week. While it's true that I occasionally long for the days of single paragraph posts, I'll ignore fellow short post fans & instead follow Mike's example by providing more insight into my insights.

Techdirt has been at the fore of intellectual property issues for a decade or more, and I've learned much along the way while informing friends about how SOPA and related bills would hinder technology advances, harm free speech and do little to promote the progress of science and useful arts. This post will focus on IP issues, starting off with yet another story that demonstrates the duplicity of Chris Dodd. The man who once proclaimed "no lobbying, no lobbying" upon leaving office now counts the days until he can lobby his former Senate colleagues. In the meantime, he is lobbying the Obama administration and inviting a few select tech companies to join in his secret plan to impose government supported censorship, despite claims to the contrary. All in a futile attempt to preserve the existing MPAA business model so his paymasters are insulated from the independent artists who are competing by embracing new technology.

The MPAA/RIAA lobbying juggernaut has been sadly successful in hobbling internet technologies, as congressional insiders and administration officials conspire to increase government control of the internet by proposing laws that would censor disfavored websites under the guise of copyright protection and cybersecurity. The takeaway is obvious, that internet users have to remain vigilant to prevent Congress from choking innovation on the internet and maintaining freedom of action for themselves. That ties in nicely with a story from Planet Money highlighting the parallels between the MPAA & German button weavers, which used government power to insulate themselves from competition enabled by new technology, leading to stagnation in button weaving technology. The parallel becomes clearer by the day. Viacom continues to sue YouTube as part of it's long attack on user generated content, while in content industries left unprotected by legal fiat, we're witnessing the movement of creators from old media to new media. Not losing those jobs in the process but merely shifting the work to outlets where the creators provide the greatest comparative advantage.

As copyright law is a mess, so is the copyright office itself. Copyright assignments last 70 years or more, but electronic records are not available before 1978. That was backward a decade ago and inexcusable today. Billions are spent to influence legislation & hundreds of law enforcement personnel work to enforce intellectual property laws, yet so little heed is given to cataloging our cultural heritage that millions of copyright records are effectively inaccessible. That has real world consequences, as there is a paucity of in print books from the 1930s-1960s since the copyright status of those works cannot be ascertained; in contrast, books from earlier decades enjoy widespread availability. With all the attention being paid to copyright enforcement, we've managed to neglect great works that have already been produced by emphasizing profit over culture. But "is there any value in cracking down on 'piracy' if it doesn't increase sales?" Congress repeatedly compromises our liberties in the name of fighting piracy, but this story suggests even that doesn't boost sales. By emphasizing enforcement and neglecting record keeping, the government has effectively made it more difficult to enjoy new & old cultural works while doing little to improve revenues for the Old Media companies the laws are intended to protect.

Alas, even internet pioneers are allowing this unhealthy obsession with IP enforcement cloud their judgments. As an admitted Flickr addict, I've taken a keen interest in the developing tactical nuclear patent war being fought between Yahoo and Facebook. It's shocking enough that Facebook was awarded patents for (a) drawing rectangles on photos and linking that box to a person, and (b) displaying an integrated list of actions on my items & those I've commented upon. What's more preposterous is that Facebook would sue over concepts so barely differentiated from preexisting Flickr features to (a) draw rectangles on photos and add a note or link, and (b) display separate lists of actions on my items & those I've commented upon. I imagine the 18 other patent claims in the lawsuit are similarly specious. Hopefully, both come to their senses and drop their lawsuits before spending all their money on lawyers.

Now, my least favorite story of the week, which completely destroys my plan to become a multithousandaire should anyone ever decide to take up Techdirt on CWF+RTB and shut down the site for the year. Yes, fellow favorite posts of the week writers, our dreams of launching a class action lawsuit to obtain our just rewards have been squelched by an activist judge* who opined that Huffington Post contributors that wrote articles without any expectation of compensation aren't entitled to any compensation even though Huffington Post turned out to be quite profitable. No justice, no peace!

jakerome’s Comments

It's not "big super computers" as you hyperventilate in your post. Rather, the well-informed representative was placidly referring to "big giant super computers." Try to get it straight next stop & end this dedication to pursuing your agenda from clouding your judgment.

What the cabbies want seems reasonable on the surface. Not sure why the Techdirt article takes such a negative to the cabbies call for deregulation. Yes, there are differences. But it's long been Uber's claim (and Techdirt, and others) that the cab industry is an over regulated, captured industry. Many of those regulations should go away, I would think this would be the one cabbie protest Techdirt could get behind. Looks to me like TD is being reflexively anti-cabbie, when the whole tone of this action is world's apart from the typical anti-Uber attack.

Does Techdirt think taxis have the right level of regulation now? That would be news!

Perhaps, but the court has no power over "the media" at large. At most, they could have sway over students acting as the media. Certainly the kangaroo court can't prohibit media from asking a questions about a court case. I mean, they can, but whatever punishment they mete out has no power outside of the ivory towers.

Publishers have the option of excluding their articles from Google News. But they do not want to exclude. Rather the publishers want Google to pay them to include the articles. Google does not want to pay, so includes only a link to the article instead of a snippet. Publishers that do not demand compensation have snippets in the news articles. All seems well.

But now, the publishers claim that Google is "discriminating" against the publishers demanding payment because the snippets are not shown. Yup, damn straight they are. They're only including snippets when they can do so without incurring additional cost. What sense of entitlement these publishers must have to demand that Google present its search results in ways the publishers prescribe and compensate the publishers for the privilege of doing so. The sad part is, the German government is so obsessed and blinded with anti-Google fury that the German leaders seem ready to force Google to present only state-approved search results while paying legacy, non-adapting corporations for collecting free traffic while failing to innovate.

It's beyond stupid. I read articles like this and can only conclude that German legacy publishers have essentially given up and now are enlisting the power of the state to support their failed, legacy business model at the expense of German's own citizens and their own freedom to search. Maddening. It is jolly to read so many articles produced by legacy publishers repeat the contradictions of their lobbyists whilst never pointing them out. That must be its own special kind of torture.

The put down of the current business model for baseball is way too pat. The Dodgers will reap something like $425 million/ year (!!!) for their current local TV deal. They are able to do so because they are collecting probably $3-4/month from nearly every cable subscriber in Greater Los Angeles (at least, that's the plan).

Compare that to $10/month from only the most ardent fans. Making the $10 package freely available would mitigate the incentive the strongest fans have to pay upwards of $100/month to cable companies just to watch the Dodgers. Without those hopeless fans getting cable just to watch the Dodgers, I reckon the amount cable companies would be willing to pay would drop more than 50%.

Exclusives have always come at a premium in entertainment, and baseball is no different. The policies suck for fans and may harm the sport in the long run as fans lose interest, but in the short-to-medium term there is no rational way the Dodgers would earn $425 million/ year for local TV rights if the new Dodgers cable channel did not have an exclusive. Back of the math reveals that pretty quick, with probably about 10 million households, the Dodgers/ MLB would need to collect $42 from each household. Since the package runs about $130/year, they would need fully 1/3 of all households to sign up for the MLB streaming package. That's simply not going to happen.

This article is the biggest piece of shit ever posted on Techdirt. It feels almost like a parody of the scare pieces Techdirt loves to mock with such hysterical lines as "I wonder if he's considered what might happen if his system were taken over as part of a botnet that took out a hospital's computer system, say, or were used to host and distribute child pornography: would he be happy about accepting responsibility for those too?"

Or how about hey, maybe the dude just doesn't care if his Techirt password is stolen. Or NYTimes password. Or the password for any of a million other sites that pose no risk to the user if stolen. Nope, making that logical inference would require more common sense than Mr. Moody could possibly muster.

Addition: $8.064 trillion in new benefits. $3.539 trillion in the 2012 budget. The new budget is now $11.603 trillion.

Division: $11.603 trillion divided by $3.539 trillion. The new budget is 3.28x the old budget.

Division: The US Gross Domestic Product is about $17 trillion. Glyn's simple plan to curb piracy would merely result in the US budget consuming just 68% of the US gross national product.

Final answer: this is one of the more absurd proposals ever to appear in Techdirt. Hopefully I'm simply missing the Swiftian subtlety & this is not actually a call for the US to more or less impose full-fledged socialism in order to solve what is, by most accounts on Techdirt & elsewhere, a mosquito of a problem. Tactical nukes seem a bit of overkill, don't they?

Maybe insightful, but wrong. You need to divide by 6, since the CDC stats are for the full year. So the death rate among the general population over 60 days is 0.7995%/365*60= 0.131%. Which is pretty damn close to the 0.1186%. Demonstrating pretty clearly that there is no obvious correlation between vaccination and near term mortality.

I reckon the difference could be chalked up to many people near death would not be vaccinated when otherwise they would be. Of course, there are many other convoluting factors-- the elderly are more likely to get the flu vaccine and have higher mortality. Ditto very young children. The least likely to be vaccinated are healthy folks in 20s, 30s, 40s. Who also have among the lowest mortality rates.

Right. Which is why the NSA needs to stick strictly to its mission of being a foreign intelligence agency. The NSA should never spy on domestic communications, and they should never share that information with law enforcement unless it relates to a foreign/ terror threat.

It is unclear if the NSA, as an organization, is capable of sticking to their assigned mission.